


don't be afraid (you're already dead)

by Utopiste



Series: "coven" is just a fancy word for gay witch sorority [6]
Category: American Horror Story, American Horror Story: Coven
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bulimia, F/F, Jealousy, Madison is clueless someone help this dumb lesbian, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-11-30
Packaged: 2019-09-02 19:00:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16792849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Utopiste/pseuds/Utopiste
Summary: When Madison comes back from the dead, the grey pallor not fully gone from her skin, she consumes. She consumes food, she consumes alcohol, she smokes till she thinks she can feel her lungs start to decay. She takes everything for herself and leaves nothing behind. Zoe watches and waits.





	don't be afraid (you're already dead)

**Author's Note:**

> Based on anon's amazing prompt: _When Madison comes back from the dead, the grey pallor not fully gone from her skin, she consumes. She consumes food, she consumes alcohol, she smokes till she thinks she can feel her lungs start to decay. She takes everything for herself and leaves nothing behind. Zoe watches and waits._
> 
> This was so good I ended up writing wayyy more than expected, thank you so much! This is set right after Misty and Zoe resurrect Madison in Coven.

Against all odds, Madison wakes up. 

In spite of Misty’s warnings, she opens her eyes again, sits up straight, and Zoe is so glad to see her all of a sudden she almost hugs her before she remembers they were never really the hugging kind of friends. 

She has always been like this, only realizing she misses someone when they come back to her, only being happy with what she has once she loses it. Zoe heard one day about amputees feeling the ghost of their limbs long after they lost it. She thinks, maybe, this is what it feels like. Some days she isn’t even sure Madison is truly back to the living world, what with the grey ashy tone she can’t seem to wash off her skin, and the absent, mechanical way she moves. 

Madison wakes up but she never really comes back. She sits up, looks at Zoe, through Zoe, eyes vacant like the blind, and when Zoe calls her name, she bends down and starts vomiting swarming bugs, meat flies and maggots, again and again and again, in a disgusting black sludge that smells like death. 

“Being alive is overrated,” she says in a croaky voice between loud wet gasps. Misty makes a disgusted noise and Zoe is reminded that she is in the room with them. 

Zoe brings her back to their shared bedroom and hasn’t left her side ever since. 

There is the phase where Madison stays in bed all day, resting, in a fetal position, and Zoe has to remind her that alive beings need food to live. She brings her smoothies because anything solid hurts her throat and soup is “for old ladies and kids with leukemia”. And then, a couple of days later, when Zoe comes back to her room with some scrambled eggs in hand, Madison is up, the grey pallor not fully gone from her skin. And she consumes. 

She consumes food, she consumes alcohol, she smokes till she thinks she can feel her lungs start to decay. She takes everything for herself and leaves nothing behind. Zoe watches and waits. She thinks this is just another step in the way. She thinks she is getting better. She throws out the chicken carcasses and the cigarette butts. She takes it all, because Madison has  _ literally _ been through hell, and she loves her.

“I’m hungry,” Madison whines, even though she is not, because it is midnight and they ate dinner two hours ago. 

Zoe sighs. “What do you want?”

And then she drives her to the closest McDonald’s drive-through so she can order a bucket load of fries. They sit in the car she  _ borrowed _ while Madison goes through it, slapping her hands away every time she tries to steal a fry - which she paid for, by the way - and under pinkish neon lights, Madison’s skin looks almost human again. 

“Do you realize Kylie Jenner has had time to launch like, three entire new lines while I was dead?” Madison complains. “How will I know if my lips are more Flirtini or Tangerine now?”

“You know what I love about you, Madison? How life-changing, near-death experiences really made you think about what’s important in life,” Zoe says. 

“Shut up and buy me some more fries,” Madison says and shoves her.

Zoe laughs and rolls her eyes and complies. Of course, by the time she comes back, Madison has left and took the fucking car with her. Typical.

She shrugs it off and walks home.

***

Zoe takes her pain and turns it into gold. 

If Madison goes out in the middle of the night to buy a new pack of cigarettes because she finished hers, Zoe comes with her; if Madison takes out some of Fiona’s old booze reserves to get drunk in the middle of the day, she pulls up a chair for herself and a book so she can keep watch; Madison is pretty sure that if she brought some boy toy home to fuck, she would stand by the door to make sure he doesn’t hurt her. And it’s not like Madison is making it easy for her either, but Zoe complains and whines and ends up repeating the same mistakes anyway. 

She is so good it makes Madison want to slap her. So she does what is closest, and fucks her zombie boyfriend. 

(She wishes she could say it feels good, and in some primal, instinctive ways, it does, but the only time she really gets any feeling out of it is opening her eyes to see Zoe’s shocked expression. She looks like a kid who tried to take cookies right out of the oven after his mother told him it was too hot and getting burned. She looks like Icarus flying too close to the fucking sun.)

“Hey, Zoe,” she says, smirking. “Care to join us?”

Zoe slams the door as she leaves. 

This time, she doesn’t come back running to her. She doesn’t even fight for him, which is disappointing. 

They don’t talk for days after that, a few lustful days spent in her room, fucking Kyle against a wall, on the floor, in the shower, never, ever in any of their beds. Zoe doesn’t come back.

(It is stupid really - but every time she comes near the bed, she thinks of waking up from the nightmares to feel more than she saw Zoe crawling into bed with her, shushing her like a mantra,  _ you’re alive, you’re here, you’re alive, alive, alive _ , holding her hair when she throws up in the bucket they keep next to her bedside now, holding her hand as they go back to sleep. She didn’t complain that her breath smelled like something crawled up here and died. She didn’t complain that they kept the lights on as they slept now. She pushed their bunk beds together to make one, queen size, adequate for its occupants.

She tells herself she is not keeping Kyle away from them for Zoe. She’s  _ not _ . She’s just possessive.)

This whole sex-for-days thing feels like binging on food did, or chain smoking for a few too many hours. Which means not so good, which means she gets bored.

Once she does, she goes down to have breakfast with the coven.

“Madison,” Cordelia acknowledges. “Good of you to join us.”

She squints, unsure if this is meant to be passive aggressive or good-hearted. When in doubt, always choose the meanest option. “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m only here because cum doesn’t have enough calories to live on.”

Cordelia freezes. “Charming,” she finally manages to say.

Zoe scoffs and leaves the table. Madison finishes pushing her eggs around in her plate in silence.

It takes a few more days for them to finally talk, boring, boring days where she tries all of her old tricks and still feels  _ empty _ , still feels her head spinning with fear and despair and the absolute certainty of death. 

But then they talk - or more accurately, Madison ambushes her - and she can push and push until Zoe finally stops pretending to be unbothered, to be so fucking nice about it. She doesn’t know what does it, because this all really was among her best work, with lines such as  _ I mean, sure, that sucks - literally - but your vagina is a literal serial killer, so _ , or _ in a way both of you fucked the other’s dead best friend, so are you soulmates or what? _ , or  _ we really made a good choice when we picked his meat stick, if you see what I mean _ .

“Oh my god,” Zoe spits. “You really think you’re so fucking smart, aren’t you? That you got me all figured out?”

“Well,  _ yeah _ ,” Madison says.

“You really are as dumb as the magazines say.” Zoe doesn’t yell though. Her eyes are cold and unfeeling and this all went terribly wrong and she says: “I’m not mad because you fucked him.”

Madison frowns, confused. “Why are you being such a bitch about it, then?”

Zoe looks at her like she is a cockroach, and a particularly dumb one at that. “Figure it out,” she says, and storms out.

She seems to be doing a lot of storming out these days.

***

Eventually, Madison figures it out.

She barges into the library, where Zoe is enjoying a very pleasant read through one of Cordelia’s books, wearing one of her sweaters that came from the Gap and Madison tried to make her throw out. Zoe glances at her but chooses not to dignify her arrival with a greeting. 

Madison heaves and struggles to catch her breath - that’s what nicotine does to one’s lungs when they already died once - before she manages to speak up.

“You’re not in love with Kyle.”

Well, duh. Zoe doesn’t even look up to the room for that. “He’s literally as smart as a two-year-old. Not even a particularly smart two-year-old. Just a normal one.”

“Well, how was I supposed to know that,” Madison complains. “You busted my ass to revive the guy!”

“You  _ killed _ him!” Zoe protests. “You do know killing people is wrong, right?”

Zoe finally closes her book and Madison, apparently encouraged by such a welcoming show of warmth, walks closer until she is right in front of her. “You’re not in love with Kyle, but you’re mad at me for sleeping with him.”

Zoe waits. There is nothing more coming after this. “This is what it took you a week to figure out?”

“Can you not be sarcastic for one second?”

“Can  _ you _ ?”

Madison throws her hands up in the air. “Yes! Great! We’ve established that I am a trash bag of a human being! We know that! That’s totally not the point!”

There is a long beat where Madison tries to stop being so flustered and Zoe lets her take her time. She looks scarily thin, Madison, even more so than usual, with tousled hair and no makeup on, dark circles under her eyes, trembling hands. 

Zoe’s traitorous jerk of a heart still beats frantically in her chest when she looks at her though. 

“Kyle is not the one you’re in love with,” Madison says, once again, and adds, “it’s me. Isn’t it?”

Zoe doesn’t say anything for a while, because she knows if she talks, it will be over. This is the perfect moment, where she still has a chance to deny it, to pretend it’s just Madison being her narcissistic self again, to gaslight her. She knows she won’t. But she  _ could _ .

“I guess,” she ends up saying. She looks down at her socks, the ones with little fox heads on them, at the wooden floor, at anything that is not Madison.

“Oh, wow, could you be just a little less romantic?” Madison says. “I’m swooning over here.”

In spite of this, when Zoe looks up, she’s smiling as she rolls her eyes, a real smile, not a smirk, a smile like she can’t stop her lips from curving up. Zoe realizes she doesn’t remember the last time Madison’s face was this expressive. 

Like she is reading her thoughts, Madison says, “I’m not gonna not be fucked up all of a sudden. Or start being nice to you. It’s not how this shit works.”

Zoe snorts. “Oh, really? I thought you were going to start buying me flowers every week. One rose for every day you’ve known me. Dumbass.”

Madison rolls her eyes and mumbles something that sounds like shut up but Zoe doesn’t hear it quite, because she is tugging at her hair and making her get up and all of a sudden Zoe is standing in the middle of the library with a book at her feet and lips on hers. 

In the following weeks, they will break up three times and die twice, but for now, there is only the hunger in the way Madison kisses, and both of their frantic heartbeats.

**Author's Note:**

> if you can't buy me fries please send me kudos


End file.
